I prefer to let nature take its course 
I could @ any one of several people, but then I wouldn’t have anything to complain about 
I’m not as easily pleased as some people, I always try and aim for perfection 
Sometimes I find the bird IDers to be a little too fast. I’ve had newly-submitted bird records get a confirming ID even before I was done editing the record or adding additional photos or notes.
It worries me so much that I can’t be bothered to look back, after 10 minutes it’s as good as dead to me
If I upload a batch I often find they’ve already been ID’ed as I got through them to tickle them up
If it’s something that is easy to identify, and you are sure your ID is correct, why is a confirming ID important to you? Identifying obvious stuff is boring. I think it’s more important for knowledgeable identifiers to focus on the difficult stuff.
iNat is not just for the exotic, some of us don’t get chance to go out every day and see anything other than the regular run of the mill boring stuff unfortunately. If identifying obvious stuff bores you then don’t do it. Leave the easy things for those who aren’t as knowledgeable.
Been there at times. That’s my trigger to do some abyss-shouting when I can’t find something new to photo. ;-)
I think a lot of what you see derives from the “workflow” approach that a particular identifier chooses. For example, I might decide that I’m going to try to improve IDs for thistles in Mexico. After I gain some basic understanding of the diagnostic characters, I will probably break the task up state by state so that I’m working with manageable batches of observations and a restricted number of species.
I’ll certainly do what I can to add wholly new IDs or to confirm existing ones with a single ID, but I’ll typically also add confirming IDs to RG observations, because that reflects my ID opinion for that particular plant. If I confidently recognize the species it might take 5–10 seconds to add an ID and phenology annotations. I’m generally not going to stop to check whether the observation has 0, 1, 2 or 7 IDs by other iNat users.
I do understand that someone else looking at the observation might think “Why did Rupert bother to add a fifth Cirsium mexicanum ID here when there are 61 other unidentified Asteraceae observations from the same park?” The basic answer is “Because I came across this observation and I was able to add an ID that reflects what I think this plant is.”
Back on the original topic, even popular taxa, like birds, are ID’ed essentially randomly by individuals with their own styles, interests, time constraints, etc. If you upload 20 bird observations and the only one not identified is the American Robin, don’t be surprised. Maybe some identifiers feel there are so many Robins that they’re going to skip over those. Other people may be focused on particular families. Maybe someone only looks at “Needs ID” from the past day, and they took the day off.
Recency is certainly a big factor: New stuff generally gets identified quickly or not for a long time. Once something sinks to, say, the 10th page of search results, it’s not going to be seen by people looking to ID new stuff. At that point, you can just wait until the right IDer comes along (“I’m going to look at every bird recorded for the Big Oak Wood.”) Or you can tag someone to see if they’re willing to add an ID.
Why add yet another agreeing ID when a record is already RG? Because one or more of the previous agreeing inatters might up and leave, taking their IDs with them. And anyway, if I spend more than 5 seconds looking at a record because it interests me, it costs me nothing in time to add another agreement.
And there’s another can of worms (but don’t ask me to identify them to species), a lot of people are going to need a lot of observations re-identifying if some of the “big” hitters ever clear off…
The more IDs the better, like you say, once you’re looking at it, you might as well.
You mean when some of the big hitters clear off. It’s a not uncommon occurrence. Whole threads have been devoted to the topic.
This has happened with a few taxa recently - I used to just mark stuff as “reviewed” if it was already RG and I agreed. But the other day I happened to do a search with “show reviewed” selected, and I found there were several thousand observations that were formerly RG and now were not. So I ended up having to go through all of them twice, in the end - it would have saved a lot of effort to just add an agreement in the first place!
If you’re in California, it’s because there are so many people adding photos of birds that identifiers can’t keep up. I often ID a few pages of birds, take a break and come back to find that there’s more birds needing ID then when I started…
Easily identified species are also the most likely to be photographed. They can quickly become smothered under newer observations of the same species.
I confess I’m one of those identifiers who do 20 pages or so of new observations at a time. If it was older than that I might never see it.
Haha - thanks! Here’s one of my favorite iNat avatar pictures I’ve stumbled across - it’s the one that gets me laughing.
I don’t know them and I’ve never personally interacted with them, but I will shout into the abyss: I want to see this person’s avatar far more often.
I’ve found observations with 5+ IDs that were incorrect in their agreed-upon ID. In fact, I just found yet another like that a couple days ago with four agreeing IDs. It’s rare, but it does happen that incorrect IDs get buried in a pool. I’ve found the only way to dig them out is to go through all of them.
At the rate new observations come in, after 10 minutes it’s pretty much as good as dead to the identifier pool.
Sadly, I’ve never even been to California. I’m in England. Where it rains. A lot.
So, if I upload 20 observations of birds and you Id 12 of them, miss the unlucky 13th and then Id 14 to 20, you’ve obviously earned a break. But not for that long
I’m probably the opposite, I’m more inclined to ignore the common and easy stuff, just as long are there’s something else to be seen.
And if the photo itself is of a dead bird, it really becomes a meta-commentary, performance art sort of thing. No ID necessary!